Zope 2.12 eggified Installation Stuff Learned

There was a short zope-dev meeting on #zope today. I'm not a zope-dev, but after they were done, I asked a question^W^W^Wgriped a bit about the new "eggified" Zope 2.12 install procedure. A big discussion ensued. I learned / noticed a couple of things:

The install instructions given in the 2.12 release were confusing not only to me. (A while back I had tried to get through them, without having really much prior experience with modern python stuff like eggs... I didn't have a nice experience there.)

"non-dev installs shouldn't use buildout"

"virtualenv + easy_install is much better" (both quoted from Tres)

People set out immediately to rectify the install instructions, I don't know when the changed ones will appear online, but it's nice to see this kind of thing move.

There does not seem to be something that gives me the functionality of installing Zope offline (like I used to have by having a tarball of a certain Zope release on my disk)... on any machine more or less (more on that below). Few people (or noone) seem to care about that.

There seems to be a mild consensus that one recommended way to install is a Good Thing™. But we don't seem to be 100% there yet.

As for the offline-stuff (or the "why do I have to re-download all this each time"), apparently easy_install can do some kind of storage of the eggs it downloads. But this seems to work only on the same platform with the same libraries. I think it's a good idea to ensure that you get the exact same stuff in a reinstall on the same machine, but it won't help when for example the developer machines and the production boxes differ slightly. I haven't looked after it really, but there seems to be another way, setting up a local proxy of PyPi or something... but people sounded a bit like if that is a big, scary thing. Buildout seems to have a better solution there, but after my previous experience and Tres recommendation, I'm not going to go there right now.

Update: just noticed that Tres also mentioned using compoze to make a local "egg store".

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IMHO, it is a sad story that Zope abandoned the old tarball-style of installing. I know that software must evolve, that there are things now in the python community that weren't there 10 years ago, but I think some decissions should be taken more carefully (like, for example, given the option to install Zope 2.12 both as an old-style tarball and the new way (egg, or whatever).

Furthermore, there is some kind of a heavy discussion about packaging these days (again, in the python community), because there is easy_install (which a lot of people avoid to use) and there some other methods, but there is no standard, and it is difficult to decide which one is better than the other.

Anyway, I'll wait to hear more about your conclusions, and learn from them, thnx for the update!

Wu, when you know how to do it, the egg-style install of Zope 2.12 actually works. (Who would have guessed?)

What was bad was the misleading documentation.

What is also bad is the mess with pythons packaging options. I saw a thread on python-dev, that after 5 mails turned into a general thread of nowhere. Instead we should have a decision made: Which packaging/distribution tool is official (and if there are warts on that, remove them so people can live with it).